


big damn heroes, sir

by ninemoons42



Category: Firefly, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Serenity (2005), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Firefly Fusion, Alternate Universe - Firefly Setting, Background Chirrut/Baze - Freeform, Big Damn Heroes, Challenge Response, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, F/M, Inspired By Tumblr, Prompt Fic, Rogue One - some of them live, Tumblr Prompt, background spiritassassin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-04
Updated: 2017-03-04
Packaged: 2018-09-28 06:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10078445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Captain Cassian Andor describes himself as possessive, in terms of a handful of things which are important to him: his guns, his will, his ship, and his crew.(Said ship, a Firefly-class, may or may not be possessive of him right back.)And now he's going to fly that ship to retrieve some of his crew.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Character notes: Cassian is not Mal; they only fought on the same side in the war. Kay may or may not be Wash, since I don't yet know if Kay has a love of dinosaurs. Luke and Leia are better than Jayne in a fight or in anything, really. Shara is a little like Kaylee and also somewhat motherly towards Cass, which makes sense, because she may or may not already be preggers with Poe at this point, and yes, she's got a Kes in this story already, and that's how things are. Chirrut is not like Shepherd Book, and Baze has the faith but only in his husband. Bodhi is clearly ship's doctor and he lives for his sister Jyn, who may or may not be empowered in her own way.

He doesn’t have to look at the readouts to know that the weather conditions are finally starting to calm down, but that’s still going to take a while, with the way that the ship is still shivering and shimmying its way down into atmosphere. 

There’s a buzz on the ship-wide speakers, and Cassian thinks he already knows what he’s going to hear, and he’s nodding even as Shara calls up from the engine room: “Getting flutter here, a lot of it, cap’n.”

“Everything goes well,” he answers, “we’ll be out into the black again and you’ll have time to fix whatever’s ailing that old thing.”

“Time I’ve got plenty of. What about things like fuel and parts and –- you get my drift, right? What about those?”

He sighs, shakes his head even though she can’t see him, keeps his eyes out the windows and his hands on the controls, which fight him with every meter down, and he thinks it might only just be the long years of familiarity with these same sticks and panels, with this particular Firefly-class boat, that’s keeping them up in the air right now. 

He veers away from a nasty-looking dust storm, grateful that the town he’s heading for is located away from those prevailing winds, and his heart isn’t in his throat when he goes through the delicate processes of adjustment demanded by the landing cycle. 

There’s no one in the cockpit to see him breathe a sigh of profound and grateful relief once they’re safely back down on the ground.

He glances at the empty co-pilot’s seat. Kay is -– not here. He’s gone home to his mother, who’s taken a turn for the worse, and Cassian privately resolves to pick up a quick and mostly legal job after this run so he can send a little more anonymous cash money their way. He’s kind of used to being able to rely on Mama Esso’s advice, and –- in a pinch -– Mama Esso’s home cooking, though the last few times he’d been to visit, he’d been the one in the kitchen, trying to remember the stews and soups of his childhood in order to coax her to eat.

Rattle and clatter of guns and leather armor as he pushes into the hold: and the twins are there, looking over their impressive arsenal, and Luke inclines his head quickly at the polished rifle and the brown leather duster at the head of the table. The rip in the left sleeve has been carefully repaired, and Cassian vaguely remembers seeing them sitting side by side in a corner of the cargo hold during one of the long ship’s nights, Leia focused on the book that she was reading in her soft steely voice and Luke surrounded by patches of cloth and spools of thread and, incongruously, the two dozen knives that they tended to carry between them. Their hands smelling of wax and oil; their belts holding soft rags.

As Cassian watches, Leia flicks a finger at her brother, and Luke goes wordlessly over to her, presenting his back and the buckles of his armor. She does him up with sure movements of her hands. Not a breath or a blink is wasted between them. 

So he, as their captain, follows suit: he shrugs into his coat and he counts his bullets, and he accepts an extra belt full of shotgun shells, and he leads the two of them out onto the soil of this moon –- 

Out to Chirrut and Baze, arm in arm at the foot of the steps into the ship: the one in his stiff clerical collar, his cane propped against his shoulder; the other with his own weapons clinging here and there to his ragged desert-hued cloak. 

“Captain Andor,” Chirrut murmurs. “I foresee that you will be bringing our comrades back quickly.”

Cassian looks him in his blind eyes and says, “Can’t appreciate the prayer for myself –- I'm all out of prayers -- but they might be needing it.” 

That gets him a lopsided smile. 

“See you later, Baze,” Leia says.

Baze grunts in response, and Cassian thinks it’s a little unfair, that the big man only sounds fond when he’s looking at his husband and when he’s looking at Leia. 

But Cassian shakes the thought off, and leads Leia and Luke onto the dirt track that snakes down a long winding slope to the dust- and fly-ridden town that he thought he’d been leaving for good only a few days ago –- too little profit in a cargo of tawdry knick-knacks, here and on pretty much any other world –- but then again, he’d somehow misplaced some of his own crew, and they were _crew_ , they were his crew, and now he’s just going to get back what’s his.

Even Luke’s eyes turn hard and flinty –- for all that they’re bluer than the cloudless sky stretching overhead –- when they stride into the town square, Leia glaring the men -– mostly the men –- out of their way. Cassian still doesn’t know how she manages to get out of all manner of brawls unscathed, no mean feat in her fine white skirts, in which she conceals her knives and other things that don’t pay to think about.

Speaking of knives: he’s now looking down at one of them. She’s holding it out to him. He waits for her to nod impatient permission, and then he takes that black blade carefully and respectfully from her. The story is that she and Luke inherited those knives from their mother -- or their mother’s friends, not a whit at all of a difference if their stories were to be believed. 

One, two, three strides and up onto the rough platform. He kicks the ragged stacks of firewood skittering away, and all the while the townsfolk are murmuring rebelliously at his back.

He’s not afraid. He’s not. He’s kind of preoccupied.

He reaches Bodhi, first, and the dust and the previous days and nights have wilted the young doctor’s stained collars, have streaked his limp cuffs with sweat and dirt and dust, but he’s still standing as upright as he can. His body angled just in front of the piled kindling. His hands bound behind his back. 

“You’ll have to walk one of us through patching you up,” Cassian says as he saws at Bodhi’s bindings.

“It is kind of a role reversal.” A quiet and pained hum of agreement. There is pain in the lines of Bodhi’s face, but Cassian has to respect the glint of determination in his eyes. “Normally you are all such work for me to do in the infirmary, after all the shooting is done.”

“Normally,” Cassian says. “This maybe ain’t normal.”

“No, no it is not.” 

Then he turns to the girl in the fraying dress and the too-large boots, and can’t help but bare his teeth in disgust at the noose that has been draped loosely around her neck. 

She makes the face right back -– but says, strangely grave and gentle, “They think fire will fix a broken mind.”

“One, they are wrong, and two, so are you,” Cassian says. “Nothing broken about you.” He cuts the ropes at her wrists and at her ankles, slashes carefully through the noose so it falls to her feet in useless coils. “Maybe you and I and the others, maybe we’re all carrying our scars and bruises. But since we’re all still here, we’re not broken. We’re just not in the same condition in which we started.”

“Crystals frighten them,” Jyn says. She seems lucid, for now, but the hollow resignation in her eyes is something he wants to erase, because he’d just seen her dancing around the town’s feast fire a few nights ago, and he’d rather be seeing her lost in the beauty of that music, free to move and think as she wants.

Not like this, face like a blank mask, strung up and waiting –- calmly, serenely –- for a fiery death.

“Well. Ain’t like those things are common around these parts. And there are legends about them, which I don’t believe.” He watches her hop down from the platform. Watches her make a beeline for her brother the doctor: and something in Cassian constricts, maybe a little sweetly, at seeing Jyn and Bodhi hold hands and hang on to each other.

Not the same as the terrible twins next to them, and that’s just how he wants it: for Luke and Leia are glaring down the mayor with identical snarls. 

“That girl is a witch, and her crystal will bring a curse on us all,” the tall man in the white suit is blustering.

“So let us take them away. We’d be doing you a favor, really, taking this made-up curse from you,” Luke says, and he takes a knife from his sleeve and starts playing with it.

The mayor takes a step forward, hands clenching into fists –- 

Cassian gets there first, with the muzzle of his rifle pressed right against the man’s throat. “One more step, you’ll regret it,” and he makes himself smile. “I’m taking all of my crew away with me and none of you will stop me or get in my way. Or I will make that curse come true, and more. I’ll burn your miserable town to ashes.”

“Why are you harboring these –- these fugitives?” That last is hissed, a vicious sound, a low sound.

“Do I need to repeat myself?” Cassian says. “They’re crew. My crew. I protect my own. Maybe try doing something like that, sometime.”

He looks back, once, as he makes his way back to the ship.

Hard to tell if Jyn is propping Bodhi up, or if it’s the other way around.

Luke and Leia are flipping three blades between each other, talking nearly in tune, step by steady step. Sunlight flashing dangerously into their faces.

Cassian looks to the ship –- to Shara hunkered on the steps with her face turned up up up to the sun, and Baze and Chirrut seemingly still exactly where he’d left them -– and he’s looking forward to that quick job for Mama Esso’s sake, to picking up Shara’s husband Kes for the next series of cargo runs, to having everyone back together again.

And -– there’s this, too: the presence of Jyn next to him in the cockpit, mimicking his movements as he sends the ship up into the sky and back into space. The presence of her dark eyes. The presence of her just-washed hair and her quiet voice, just about steady and assured only when she’s murmuring navigational checkpoints. 

When she reaches out to touch him, he allows himself to list a little in her direction.

(She sleeps in his bunk, as soon as there’s someone to spell him at the controls, and he’s not ashamed to admit that the clinging to her is the real reason why he rode out to the rescue.)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Week Two: "serenity" at [@rebelcaptainprompts](http://rebelcaptainprompts.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr.
> 
> I am also on tumblr myself -- look me up [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
